As I Lie Here

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As I lie here, wanting to remember if you, still, sometimes love me, as I, still, all of the time, love you,

I feel your absence weigh down on the wrinkled body of the mattress on which I lie and our legs once shuffled themselves beneath these white sheets.

As I lie here, tracing the letters formed by the curves of your hair, I can read the ways in which we wrote our love between the margins of this bed frame.

All of this, I can remember, as I lie here, but what good are these recollections if they rest on a mattress covered in blankets without their thread?

The night is cold and my chest is wet from squeezing these moments of you from my heart, and I am wounded with not having kept you and knowing that I have lost you—

Having lost the hands that held me on nights like these, when the airlessness of solitude suffocate my lungs, I love you in silence—Like wine that has lost its grape.

I know you, maybe, no longer love me.
Who could love me after I marooned our couple on that island where the sun set on us and as waves do to footprints, the autumn wind blew away the kindle of our romance?

Know this: I miss you, my love, and I’ve loved you so much that I want to love you as much more, and still the small creak of a memory’s whisper of you brings the sweet scent of your breath into my nostrils and the taste of your lips onto my tongue.

As I lie here, breathing in the ashes of your shadow, the aroma of longing carries you to me and the brevity of your beauty exists, again, on the pillow next to me.

I know no other way to lie here and miss you then this: to hold onto my flame like a star flickering under the cloak of an endless day, and count the sway of falling autumn leaves, as winter begins to call your name and wonder if you still love me, as I have, still, loved you.